Hieronymus Bosch, Touched By The Devil

A First Friday Film, co-presented by the Farnsworth

In 2016, the Noordbrabants Museum in the Dutch city of Den Bosch held a special exhibition devoted to the work of Hieronymus Bosch, who died 500 years ago. This late-medieval artist lived his entire life in the city, causing uproar with his fantastical and utterly unique paintings in which hell and the devil always played a prominent role.

"2016 marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch. Whether you know it or not, his wildly bizarre imaginings of hell are permanently etched upon your psyche. Pieter van Huystee tracks down his 25 or so surviving paintings, recording the meticulous work of archivists to definitively attribute the work to the artist (10 family members painted) as well as the snarky jousting by Dutch and Spanish curators over granting access to the masterpieces. (The Garden of Earthly Delights, the Prado’s Mona Lisa, has not left Spain in 400 years and it’s not about to anytime soon.) Bosch’s vivid imagination spawned precise, grotesque, salacious juxtapositions: 'a bird-headed monster wearing a cooking pot as a helmet while devouring a man whose backside emits fire, smoke and a flock of blackbirds.' (- Tom Rachman, The New York Times). Tantalizing, repulsive, hilarious, and sexually perverse: his hell is our hell, even after 500 years." - Film Forum

Directed by Pieter van Huystee

Starring Matteo Ceriana, Gabriele Finaldi, John Hand

Netherlands | 2016 | NR | 1h 26min

FASCINATING. Bosch’s images are surreal, crazy, violent, sinister, astounding. They can make your eyes pop open in disturbed wonder. (The film) brings us literally closer to Bosch’s images than one could probably get in almost any museum… (it) offers a true immersion in his artistry. – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

(Bosch’s) paintings, teeming with demons, creatures worthy of H.G. Wells’s ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ and surreal amalgams of all sorts, still strike awe… It’s a measure of Bosch’s imaginative genius that the imagery in works like The Garden of Earthly Delights outstrips in boldness many of the extreme digital fantasies in Hollywood horror films.– Stephen Holden, The New York Times